Google has agreed that it will pay $391.5million to 40 U.S. state to resolve a dispute about location tracking.
Google continued to collect location data, despite users believing that they had disabled it in their account settings. Information about the locationAccording to the Oregon Department of Justice, (DoJ), in PostOn Monday, November 14, its website will be available.
As part of the settlement, Google also agreed to “significantly improve” its location tracking disclosures and user controls, starting in 2023.
Google uses the behavioral and personal data it collects through location tracking and other methods in order to build a detailed user profile. This allows the company to deliver targeted ads that are highly profitable to users.
The investigation that led to this week’s settlement was prompted by a 2018 Associated Press (AP) article that revealed that Google “records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.”
The AP said at the time that the issue impacted around 2 billion devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system and hundreds of millions iPhones using Google Maps or the company’s Search site.
Its report looked at Google’s Location History and Web & App Activity settings, and found that while Location History is turned off by default and needs a user to manually activate it, Web & App Activity was automatically switched on when users set up a Google account.
The states’ investigation concluded that since 2014, Google broke state consumer protection laws by misleading users about its location-tracking system.
“Specifically, Google confused its users about the extent to which they could limit Google’s location tracking by adjusting their account and device settings,” Oregon’s DoJ said.
The settlement also requires Google to be more transparent about its privacy practices. For example, it will make it easier for users to see when they change a location-related setting. The company has also been told to provide users with detailed information regarding the kind of location data Google is pulling in, and also how it’s used, by clearly laying it out on a “Location Technologies” webpage.
“For years, Google has prioritized profit over their users’ privacy,” Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum commented in response to the settlement. “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location-tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.”
Rosenblum added: “Until we have comprehensive privacy laws, companies will continue to compile large amounts of our personal data for marketing purposes with few controls.”
Digital Trends reached out to Google to get a response. We will update this article once we hear back.
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